Standing in a gravel parking lot on 63rd Street in east Boulder, City Councilman Macon Cowles sees the past on one side -- in the coal-burning Valmont power plant -- and the future on the other -- in the Boulder County Recycling Center.

"My face turns from a frown into a smile, from the real concerns that I have for the future of our planet, for our children and our grandchildren, to looking at our recycling center in Boulder," Cowles said. "The use of materials in our society from cradle to grave produces about 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and here we have not a waste stream but a resource stream."

Cowles, an environmental and civil rights attorney by profession, is seeking re-election to his third term overall and second four-year term on the Boulder City Council. The Camera asked each of the 11 candidates to take a reporter on a short tour of Boulder that highlights their personal and policy relationship to the community they seek to serve.

Cowles spoke in dramatic and passionate terms about the high stakes of Boulder achieving its environmental goals, from creating a municipal electric utility to increasing the amount of waste that is diverted from landfills to 85 percent to 90 percent.

Meet the candidates

The Daily Camera asked each of the 11 City Council candidates to take a reporter on a short tour of Boulder that highlights their personal and policy relationship to the community they seek to serve. They are being published this week in no particular order.

Today: Ed Byrne and Macon Cowles

Tuesday: John Gerstle and Kevin Hotaling

Wednesday: Jonathan Dings and Micah Parkin

Thursday: Matt Appelbaum and Mary Young

Friday: Andrew Shoemaker and Sam Weaver

Saturday: Greatful Fred Smith

Continuing to extract carbon from the Earth and burn it will make the planet uninhabitable, Cowles said. Boulder has the opportunity to be one of just a few American communities leading the way toward a greener, cleaner future.

"What's at stake is the American environment and the American economy itself," he said. "We need leaders who can show the way to a cleaner economy. It's simply not done outside of a few enclaves. We want to show people you can reduce the impact on the environment of the economy and still have a very high quality of life."

He shares those goals with many other council members and candidates. Cowles said he has insisted and will continue to insist that the city be rigorous in how it measures its progress. Just as everyone understands what a needle on E means for their gas tank or what the Dow Jones Industrial Average means for stock prices, people need environmental metrics that tell them the impact of city policies and programs on greenhouse gas emissions, he said.

Cowles is equally passionate when he talks about creating "15-minute neighborhoods," where residents can get access to everything they need, including regional transportation, within a 15-minute walk.

Making gifts to the future

Cowles' second stop is Valmont Butte, the site of a former mine and town center, where the city cleaned up lead-contaminated soil under an agreement with state and federal regulators and the former owners. The former mine buildings remind him of the community's debt to the past, which, in the words of Jane Jacobs, "one of the great commentators on the American city," cannot be repaid to the past but can only be repaid by making gifts to the future, he said.

Across the street is the new LEED platinum certified buildings of Via, the organization that provides special transit services for seniors and people with disabilities.

"We have to shape our communities and our buildings in a way that pays tribute to the past by developing communities that will hold the life of our people now and in the future in a way that sustains them and encourages people to become more fair, more just, more caring and respectful of one another and of the Earth," he said.

His final stop is The Cup, a bustling coffee shop on East Pearl Street. He orders an affogato, a scoop of vanilla ice cream topped with a shot of hot espresso, his favorite dessert for any time of day.

The Cup is a short walk from a home the Cowles recently have renovated on the 1700 block of Mapleton Avenue, and the lively neighborhood represents many things Cowles wants for the rest of Boulder.

"This area in particular resulted because of land-use regulations about 15 years ago that were developed in cooperation and also with a lot of tension between the developers and the commercial interests and the residential neighborhood behind it," he said. "But what we ended up with is a neighborhood that everyone has embraced as a really important, lovely, vibrant, 18-hour neighborhood."

'Make our urban areas more urban'

Creating 15-minute neighborhoods will mean different things in different areas, he said.

For example, in south Boulder's Devil's Thumb neighborhood, it might mean better bicycle lanes and paths so that people can more easily ride to a grocery store that is more than a mile away. On University Hill, the presence of Delilah's Pretty Good Grocery at Ninth Street and College Avenue means residents can pick up something for dinner without going to Alfalfa's or even further.

One thing the city should not do, he said, is add more lanes for vehicle traffic.

"Congestion is the friend of alternate modes," he said. "That's a recognition that in congested corridors people are likely to choose another way to get around because driving becomes untenable."

The denser, more urban Boulder that Cowles envisions also will protect the natural world around the city, he said, though he emphasized he doesn't want to see unlimited growth within the city limits.

"I have a unique perspective on the biologically productive land that lies outside the urban growth boundary," he said. "I have a finely tuned sense that to keep the wild areas wild, we need to make our urban areas more urban."

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